The Library Anarchist

Asexual/Aromantic Agender (she/they)

[robotsandfrippary]

fresh, clean no-terf version for reblogs!

Your mom and aunts aren’t on tumblr.  Please warn them about this as well. 

[jenniferrpovey]

Thank you! I’ve been looking for the TERF-free version of this.

[gentlyepigrams]

Hey! I’m the age of some of your moms and aunts and the OG version of this post helped me catch my cancer in 2023. I had a hysterectomy at the beginning of 2024 and I’ve been cancer-free since then. If I hadn’t read this information, I wouldn’t have reported bleeding to the next doctor I saw. I might have died, and I probably would have had to undergo chemo and/or radiation, both of which I avoided.

Keep the reblogs going to save a life!

[uhohimapufferfish]

LOA Data Project

I've been working on a project that I've finally found the courage to make public. I've already put it in the discord, but I've been told it would be a good idea to post it in other places.

Essentially, I've been capturing data from LOA campaigns and compiling it in a spreadsheet. I'm not done with all the campaigns, and I still need to link my notes (showing my work), but the base is established.

You can find it here if you are interested.

The spreadsheet does contain spoilers in the notes

[magnetic-rose]

NYT has been discouraging reporters from sharing photos of luigi mangione - not due to concerns for his safety but to dissuade sympathy - and refuses to post his alleged manifesto in full. and today, they published an opinion by bret stephens about how brian thompson is the "real working class hero" of this story.

reddit deleted luigi's account, which was completely innocuous and consisted mostly of him giving out advice in health subreddits. they're also deleting any post that includes his alleged manifesto and banning users for sharing it.

luigi yelled that this was "an insult to the intelligence of the american people" while he was being dragged by police and news pundits are framing it as a deranged and violent outburst. news media are picking apart details of his life to paint him as a cold-blooded and mentally ill individual. even something as innocent as playing "among us" with friends is being framed as some insidious look into an assassin's disturbed psyche, ffs.

news media are also capitalizing on luigi's supposed "bizarre and impossible to understand" politics as an obvious way to paint him as a scary individual when the guy is... a centrist, at most. whose views are similar to those of your average college-educated white guy.

multiple news media also keep harping on about how luigi comes from a rich family. an obvious attempt to break the class solidarity that's been formed around this case by continuously trying to tell us "oh he's not like you guys" while ignoring the now pretty well-documented accounts of his multiple health struggles throughout the years.

and all this, and he hasn't even been found guilty of the crime he's allegedly committed. luigi is, as of right now, still innocent until proven guilty. and the news are trying to tear him apart because they obviously fear the symbol he's becoming for low and middle class america.

[luulapants]

I'm so frustrated by the lack of response to the mass psychogenic illness of law enforcement officials claiming to suffer contact fentanyl poisoning. There were a few studies done that quietly concluded that it's not real, none of the cases were credible, and the symptoms most closely resemble a panic attack or somatic episode.

No one is connecting this to systemic issues in police training and culture and no one is treating this as the canary in the coal mine it is.

Modern police training is functionally cult indoctrination, and intentionally cultivates paranoia. Police learn that everyone is out to get them, danger lurks around every corner, and their only job is to make it home alive after their shift.

They then enter the body of police culture, where questioning the bad behavior of fellow officers is at best strictly socially punished and at worst can get them killed, where they are constantly vigilant to say the right things and portray the right beliefs.

Suddenly, after generations of mainstream culture being generally supportive of police, in the midst of an anxiety-riddled pandemic, there is a highly-publicized backlash against law enforcement. Regular people are saying ACAB, calling cops fascists and murderers and wife-beaters. They're posting officers' service records on social media. Police, unwilling to believe they are evil, experience a cognitive dissonance backlash effect and cling to beliefs that contradict reality.

No one should be shocked - and no one should be hesitant to say - that there is a mental health crisis in law enforcement. They are paranoid, hyper-vigilant, and mired in cognitive dissonance. They have guns and virtually unchecked power to enact violence in their communities. Making up delusional stories about fentanyl is a pretty mild outcome compared to what we should be expecting from these circumstances.

Police aren't just bastards. They're a danger to themselves and others.

[luulapants]

BTW, for anyone thinking this is an old story, the reason I'm bringing it up now is that it is actively being used to justify denying books, mail, and other documents to people in prison. The entire state of Wisconsin just banned donated books.

Prison staff are having psychogenic episodes they blame on fentanyl, and the response from DOC administration has been to appease and legitimize this hysteria by restricting some of the few freedoms left to incarcerated people. Their reaction should be, "Holy shit, the most vulnerable population in our state is in the care of people who in the midst of a mental health crisis so sever it's causing mass delusions."

[thecottageinthedark]

[anyroads]

Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement

[mamzier]

[anyroads]

In which we're all Truman

[anyroads]

#this is how it feels to be on tiktok#every video is secretly an ad somehow and theyre so good at hiding it u don't find out until the wnd#end*

This post has way too many notes and they've been clogging up my notifs for a month, but these are the first ones I've seen that Get It. Thank you. This is exactly it.

I wasn't talking about the absurdity of companies trying to advertise cars or vacations that no one can afford, like everyone in the notes seems to think. There are plenty of people who can afford them. Fewer than there used to be, but corporations aren't starving.

I was talking about the invasive way advertisers have taken over every modicum of available space and how it's no longer possible to turn anywhere without advertising being pushed on you, despite the fact that most people don't have the kind of expendable income that these companies are trying to extract from them. The less money the average person has to throw around, the more aggressively they're hounded to hand it over. Where people used to be able to afford a new car and a vacation and still throw expendable income around, they now save up for one or another big purchase (those who can afford one, and that population has significantly dwindled). People limit their other spending, and in response companies descend on our consciousness, on every last bit of space they can squeeze their presence into, like pigeons onto a handful of seeds thrown on the ground.

You have to sit through advertisements to watch something on youtube only to realize the video is, itself, an ad in disguise. You can't pump gas without a little screen blaring at you wanting you to buy things. Billboards and bus benches weren't enough, they have to be energy gobbling screens now so five companies can sell you shit while you wait instead of just one. Every available surface is screaming at you to BUY THE THING. Where you used to be able to play a game on your phone, now you can't get through more than a round of any without having to sit through ads to keep playing. Ads that are pushing other games to you that have more ads. Games based on making working class jobs look fun. Be a barista and fulfill every order or the customers will be angry! Lolololol! Work at a hotel and don't fail, making the demanding customer angry is failing don't fail! Hahahahahahahaaahaaaaahaaaaaaaa it's fun! Run a farm and make money to buy more things to grow and sell to make money to buy more things to grow and sell to make more money to buy more things to grow and sell and and and! Even in your free time you should be thinking about your place in the market economy! Or worse, they're ads for predatory games, whether they're "play our game and win real money!" bullshit or "doctors want you to play this to avoid alzheimer's [if you're old play this game where we'll exploit your confusion about technology to sell you more things.]"

Every free moment you have, every free surface you come across is another opportunity to sell you something. We aren't able to get a break from it in our free time in our own home unless we constantly take steps and make effort to, like installing ad blockers - which youtube and other websites are constantly working against - but those don't even work on your phone or tablet. And the closer to home the advertisement, the more it targets you specifically, because your personal devices, that should be your personal, intimate, private property and space, are exploited to collect data on you to wrench every last cent from your wallet. They want to get to know you, not because they're curious about you, but because they want your money. They don't just see you as a wallet with thumbs, they do so unabashedly and brazenly and aggressively.

This post wasn't about the content of what's being advertised to us. It was about the relentless, instrusive aggression with which advertising invades our privacy and personal space and every inch of public space. We are exposed to hundreds of images daily, none of which are art or even remotely creative or inspiring, but instead demand our attention and our money while ignoring that both have been stripped bare by the mere need to exist from one day to the next.

This post was about the insidious way advertising has embedded itself into culture and consciousness, so much so that in a post trying to call this out, most people's immediate reaction is, "yes, the problem is that I can't afford the thing being advertised" and not "why can't I go three seconds without being advertised to" in the first place. That advertisers continue to pour money into new ways to insert themselves into the average person's life when it's absolutely fucking pointless.

[elliespectacular]

Don't much care for the whole "I will no longer do this Normal Thing if I suspect someone watching me might have a fetish for it." like, y'all this is why people are censoring their damn feet in otherwise-innocuous photos.

Hate to break it to you but everything is a fetish. Drinking water? Fetish. Eating? Fetish. Sneezing? Fetish. Clearing your throat? Fetish. Burping, farting, pissing, shitting, walking, sitting, standing, having your mouth visible when you talk, making certain mouth sounds, your accent (yes yours), your skin color (yes yours), makeup, lack-of-makeup, smelling bad, smelling good, smelling neutral, hair, lips, noses, eyes, ears, chins, shoulders, necks, armpits, elbows, fingers, chests, stomachs, backs, hips, thighs, knees, knee pits, ankles, toes, soles - all fetishes. Like it or not someone somewhere will Perceive You and they will Like What They See.

And they will be silent and normal about it because guess what? Fetishes are normal and most people know how to conduct themselves around others tactfully. We only ever find out about specific fetishes as they relate to us in particular when someone is choosing to be decidedly Not Normal about it, so we assume everyone who has those fetishes is a tactless weirdo. Rookie mistake. I guarantee some of your friends have fetishes for innocuous non-sexual things too, and it doesn't make them some kind of pervert creep.

So please for fucks sake live your damn life. Don't contort your entire existence around the fear of the possibility that you might maybe possibly inadvertently turn someone on a little sometimes. This too is a fetish.

[elliespectacular]

Hey remember that thing I said about being silent and normal about it? Just so we're clear, this is a PSA for people on the cusp of becoming puritans, not a fetish confessional booth 👍

[anarchistmemedistro]

ok realizing this needs to be said because not everyone knows:

building affordable housing is a red herring. a scam. a multilevel marketing scheme.

there is far more housing than there are people. you would think housing is expensive because the supply is too low and the demand too high. we’re taught to believe in the ‘law of supply and demand’ but that’s invariably a gross simplification.

real estate is always a great investment because land is a fundamentally finite resource, and fundamentally necessary for life. most investments tend to fluctuate, to increase and decline in value, but real estate almost always increases, and often at far higher rates than ‘the market’ at large offers.

so what does this mean? it means that there are many times more vacant homes than there are homeless people. it means buying a home and renting it for more than the mortgage while the equity only grows is an incredible investment. heck buying a home and not renting it is still a great investment. SO no matter how many homes you build, ‘affordable’ or not, they will be bought up and hoarded by the rich and housing will remain unaffordable for everyone else.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[hollowboobtheory]

i support universal free healthcare for one simple reason: if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness you should quit your job. quitting your job is the correct response to terminal illness. but you can’t do that if your healthcare is tied to your job

[hollowboobtheory]

listen if somebody knows that they will be dead in a years time, and you are forcing them to continue to come into work, that’s fucked up. terminally ill people should be able to quit their jobs and live their last few months to the fullest. i don’t get how that’s a controversial opinion

[thebreakfastgenie]

Voting for Democrats is the "leaving the house, getting some exercise, and drinking more water is good for your mental health" of societal change. Everyone keeps telling you to do it, worst of all your mom keeps telling you to do it, and it's not a magical cure-all, but it actually works and rotting in your room shitposting does not help in either scenario.

[oppositionresearch]

Also like mental health, voting doesn't solve the whole problem! But if you aren't doing this bare minimum thing, the other tools you have aren't going to work as well as they should either. If you get medicine and continue rotting in your room shitposting, you will probably still be miserable. If you get a union at work but don't vote for politicians who support unions, the union won't be able to advocate for its members as effectively and work will still be miserable.

[mikkeneko]

Voting is maintenance. It's like doing the dishes or cleaning the leaves out of the gutters. You're never going to get to a point where you are Done and Never Have To Do It Again (alas,) because time will continue to pass and you will continue to eat meals and the trees will continue to drop leaves into your gutters and right wingers will continue to submit bad bills to every session of congress.

You'll never be done with maintenance. But if you don't do that maintenance, your situation can and definitely will get Worse

[foxofninetales]

[constant-state-of-self-discovery]

Finally a take on the 'vote or else' shit I can vibe with. It's currently like showering with dysphoria- miserable and annoying with no real positive outcome past the current state not rapidly getting worse, but that's better than the alternative of things rapidly getting worse

[eosofspades]

i didn't have "i'm broken" teenage asexual angst i had "i'm literally being the only reasonable one about this concept and the rest of you are behaving like fucking freaks" perception issues

[catscatscatscatscatscatserybody]

This is so fucking funny

[pippenpaddlopsicopolisthethird]

The holy grail of searching through academic literature is coming across a string of publications that are like:

Here’s An Idea. Smith et al. 2016

Terrible Idea; a comment on Smith et al. 2016. Johnson 2016.

You’re Wrong Too; a response to Johnson 2016. Nelson 2016.

Guys Just Stop Fighting, None Of Us Know What’s Going On; a Review of the Current Literature. McBrien 2017.

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Not even an exaggeration.

[thiswaitingheart]

“If We Knew What We Were Doing, It Would Not be Called Research, Would It?”

[alberto-balsalm]

[feralbiologist]

tags via @jesterbutch

[theaudientvoid]

Concept: in a setting where vampires exist and can only be harmed by symbols of faith (crucifixes, etc.), a James Randi-style skeptic/supernatural debunker witnesses his family murdered by vampires, and dedicated his life to hunting down what he believes are a cabal of ordinary serial killers with a blood fetish and some cheap plastic fangs. They die when he shoots them with an ordinary gun, granted holy status by the sheer force of his belief that they are actually just ordinary humans who will die when shot.

[official-torfmoor]

The reason the sun burns vampires is that all the plants worship it.

[thepariahcontinuum]

That is the single most insane addition possible and I love it.

[justangrymacaroni]

as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit

[justangrymacaroni]

1. that’s a garter stitch, which you can clearly see despite it being made of clay

2. they took the time to animate a modified continental style of knitting, including showing how his working yarn is wrapped around his pinky, and that he’s flicking with his index on his right hand

3. he only has four fingers and yet this is better than the vast majority of knitting on tv

[brightlotusmoon]

I found photos of those Pallas Cat kittens born this year and bye I'm deceased

[curlicuetruth]

why do these kittens have the exact same energy as a nest of baby owls

[sanguine-tenshi]

@curlicuetruth you are very right

[curlicuecal]

[akashicrecord]

no offense but if your friend is trying out a new hobby be fucking nice to them

[akashicrecord]

friends say hurtful things, whether it's out of jealousy, trying to be funny, etc. I don't believe it usually means they're an irredeemable person who you need to cut off. I just think we should be mindful of how snarkiness can impact someone's confidence and likelihood to keep pursuing their interests

[romance-evil-aro]

"can i identify as aro even if-" you can do whatever you want forever👍

[romance-evil-aro]

@salt413 keep up the good work

[lolly-pop456]

Identify as whatever you want right now because you’ll never figure out what or who you are without experimenting first

[toastbutteregg]

[abandoned-as-mustard]

All the people in the notes saying 'that's too busy'... maybe this post just wasn't aimed at you.

[breelandwalker]

"That's Too Busy." So sorry you were raised on Landlord White with occasional forays into Shades Of Beige and can't handle patterns or saturation in your colors.

[forestkodama]

Our house is on the market right now, and so far feedback has been "paint the walls" and "remove the wallpaper from the bathroom"

And after discussing it, we decided not to spend thousands of dollars to remove the soul we put into this house. If you don't like it, either buy it and change it or don't buy it. This isn't hard.

[vaspider]

That wallpaper is amazing.

[uhohimapufferfish]

When I moved into my house my dad was always saying stuff like “well you want to be able to sell it later”. We hadn’t even moved my meager possessions out of the U-Haul yet. And, frankly, it pissed me off.

For twenty-three years I lived in places where the majority of the aesthetics of my surroundings were decided by other people. When I lived with my parents the only room I was allowed to decorate was my room, and even then the colors I painted my walls and even the color of my furniture and bedspread had to be okayed by my parents. Then, I get to college and the most I could really do was tape posters to my walls because all my rooms were pre-furnished.

I moved into a house forty-five minutes away from where I work (my mortgage would cost the same as rent would if I stayed in the area) specifically because I didn’t want to deal with rules about what I did aesthetically with my living space. I’m not going to let some hypothetical person, who probably isn’t even alive yet because I plan to live in this house until I die or am physically unable, influence my decisions. I have dark purple walls that are going to be a pain in the ass to paint over. I’m working on redoing all the trim and painting the cheap cabinets black since everything in this house had been painted with acrylic white paint because the previous owners had used it as a rental. I’m aware my tastes aren’t the same as everyone else’s, but it doesn’t matter because it’s my house.

Property is a luxury, even though it shouldn’t be, and I encourage anyone who is able to buy a house, especially if it’s a small 100-year-old fixer-upper like mine, to give it personality. Allow it to reflect the people who reside within it, and don’t be afraid to let it look lived in.